On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 2:54 PM, ashok _ <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 6:44 AM, John Sundman <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> The most glaring recent example of this philosophy in action was the >> "Transitional Government Authority" (or whatever it was called) put in place >> in Iraq by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal right after the 2003 invasion and >> headed by the American Viceroy Paul Bremmer. Under the Rumsfeld/Bremmer >> plan, what little remained of the Iraqi state was forcibly dissolved on the >> theory that everything was going to be run by NGOs and private companies and >> the magic fairy dust of the free market was going to magically fix all >> problems. >> >> > > Its interesting that the "installed" government in Somalia is also > called "Transitional Federal Government" - the president is a > British-Somali , the prime minister is an American-Somali, and most of > the cabinet lives in Nairobi.
At a time when much attention is being paid to corporate lobbying and crony capitalism in America there's hardly any attention being paid to the trans-continental reach of corporations that have at will been installing and running governments in the farther reaches of civilization and influencing government policy everywhere. There is almost no supervisory oversight for bribes and lobbying that happens at the international level - domestic voters care and understand very little about why and how a vote is made in the Durban round of climate change talks, or how the WTO sanctions on a country affect global trade balances. Yet these are the instruments that companies use to wage war against the people of the world. Rather cynically - it isn't that they care to harm, it's that they don't care - anything that can push up the revenues and profits of a quarter are what matter - the environmental and social costs of such change are externalized and borne by the people. Capitalism as practiced by corporations today is the socializing of costs and the privatization of profits. Libertarian principles that soundly benefit big capital are first tried out in nations like Iraq, Haiti, Somalia and pretty much anywhere that the rule of law is weak, and where the citizens cannot question the injustices done to them. In the worst of Soviet communism the state captured private capital. In present day capitalism, the private capital captures the state. Adam Smith or any of the enlightenment thinkers who backed capitalism wouldn't be able to recognize the perverted form that exists today. Closer to home (for most in this list that is), Manmohan Singh and Montek Singh Ahluwalia both receive pensions from the World Bank. This isn't some idle coincidence - they run modern India pretty much as big business wants it to be run. Now that the 2G scam has broken out and politics of convenience and crony capitalism is being questioned by the public, the capitalistic state punishes India by withdrawing funds from the markets. As the John Dewey quote goes: "As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance." A lengthier extract goes like this: "Power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country, not necessarily by intention, not necessarily by deliberate corruption of the nominal government, but by necessity. Power is power and must act, and it must act according to the nature of the machinery through which it operates. In this case, the machinery is business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda. In order to restore democracy, one thing and one thing only is essential. The people will rule when they have power, and they will have power in the degree they own and control the land, the banks, the producing and distributing agencies of the nation. Ravings about Bolshevism, Communism, Socialism are irrelevant to the axiomatic truth of this statement. They come either from complaisant ignorance or from the deliberate desire of those in possession, power and rule to perpetuate their privilege. . . ."
